Games company Feral Interactive’s call for a PPA be set up to offer the latest Stable Mesa drivers on Ubuntu has been semi-answered. Emphasis on semi, there. As noted by Gaming on Linux, a new stable Mesa PPA is now available — hurrah — but it is not “official” in the way that the stress-tested Nvidia drivers PPA is — boo.

ROSA is a Linux distribution forked some time ago from Mandriva Linux by a team of Russian developers, Rosa Lab, or officially LLC NTC-IT ROSA.

I reviewed their distributions several times: ROSA KDE R7, ROSA Desktop 2012 and even interviewed the ROSA team.

The most recent release of ROSA is now ROSA Desktop Fresh R8, which is available in several flavours: MATE, GNOME 3, KDE 4 and Plasma 5. I decided to try the Plasma 5 edition of this distribution, especially as my interest to Plasma increased after the good impression Kubuntu 16.10 left on me.

There are links to the ISO images available on the ROSA download page, and I used it to get my own version of this Linux distribution. The size of ROSA Desktop Fresh R8 Plasma 5 64-bit image is 1.9 Gb. The dd command helped me to "burn" the image to the USB stick.

Fedora-based Korora 25 was released Wednesday in 64-bit versions. Users are urged to upgrade. Elsewhere, Jack Wallen was seriously impressed by Fedora 25 and blogger DarkDuck said ROSA R8 is "near-perfect." Bruce Byfield discussed obstacles to Linux security just as a new kernel vulnerability comes to light. Dedoimedo declared the best KDE distro of 2016 and FOSSBYTES has 10 reasons to use Ubuntu.

OnePlus has never been one to play by the rules. Back when it made its entrance into the crowded smartphone market with the One, it set itself apart by selling a premium handset at a mid-tier price and offering invitation-only purchases instead of the standard preorders. The 3T very much fits with this rebellious nature. Essentially a refreshed version of the 6-month-old OnePlus 3, the new phone undermines another smartphone constant: the yearly update.

iPhone users are familiar with the concept of the mid-cycle model—a handset that keeps the same enclosure but beefs up features and internal components. But there’s always been a special hook with Apple’s S phones, a reason for current owners to rush out and buy the new model. The 3T could be seen as OnePlus’ attempt to mimic the success Apple has had with the formula (and in fact, the company says it picked T for the new phone’s surname simply because it’s a letter higher than S).

In recognition of the increasingly central role open source technology has played for the networking sector, the Linux Foundation today named Arpit Joshipura as its general manager for networking and orchestration.

Joshipura, a veteran tech executive who has worked at Dell, Ericsson, and Nortel, among others, is considered by the organization to be a foundational contributor to open source software in general and networking in particular. Currently, he’s the chief marketing officer for Prevoty, an application security startup in Los Angeles.

The team behind the Apache Zeppelin open-source notebook for big data analytics visualization has renamed itself ZEPL and announced $4.1M in Series A funding.

ZEPL, which swears a certain professional football organization had nothing to do with it ditching its former name (NFLabs), is one of numerous companies smelling blood in the water around Tableau, the $3.5 billion business intelligence and analytics software vendor that has stumbled financially in recent quarters and seen its stock price plummet accordingly. The pitch from ZEPL entering my email inbox read: "Is Open Source project eating Tableau's lunch?"

The updated 4.8.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.8.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st...

ST unveiled a Cortex-M4F based “SensorTile” sensor and BLE module plus an open source dev kit that adds audio, micro-USB, and an Arduino-like interface.

STMicroelectronics (ST) announced its SensorTile sensor module at its developer conference in October where it was one of the highlights of the show. Now the company has officially launched the 14 x 14mm SensorTile module along with an open source “STEVAL-STLKT01V1” development kit. The kit can be used for developing wearables, gaming accessories, smart-home, and other Internet of Things devices.

For phone lovers, the Android space is the place to be. Inside the Android Kingdom things move fast and, for the most part, set the goalposts for the rest of the market. Often, what you find in contemporary Android phones eventually makes its way down to iPhones and what few other rivals remain!

QHD panels is one example of this; dual-lens cameras and curved OLED displays are others. 2016 was a decent year for Android releases, with strong handsets from all major players. Sales were, once again, dominated by Samsung in the Android sphere (and Apple elsewhere).

There were some pretty big developments, however, such as the Galaxy Note 7 disaster and Google entering the fray with its Pixel phones. The latter point is a huge deal for hardcore Android fans, as this is the first time Google has actually taken the bull by the horns and released its own, bespoke smartphone.

Another nasty Linux kernel bug surfaces [Ed: Did you know that local priv. escalation is a “nasty” bug? CVE isn’t so sexy. Give it a logo, name, and Web site maybe? Look what a disgusting thing the security ‘industry’ and reporting have become…]

Let me get some interesting tit-bits not related to the day-trip out-of-the-way first –

I don’t know whether we had full access to see all parts of fuller hall or not. Couple of days I was wondering around Fuller Hall, specifically next to where clothes were pressed. Came to know of the laundry service pretty late but still was useful. Umm… next to where the ladies/gentleman pressed our clothes, there is a stairway which goes down. In fact even on the opposite side there is a stairway which goes down. I dunno if other people explored them or not.

The Samsung Gear S3 has made its way to many markets including the US, Europe, and the far east. If you have a Samsung Galaxy Device then you can download the Gear Manager App, that is used to connect to the smartwatch with the phone, from Galaxy Apps Store. If you are using a non-Samsung device you have to do things a little differently.

[...]

Whilst we wait for the iOS Gear Manager app to become available users are using the Leaked version that became available. Hopefully, we won’t have to wait too long now for the official version.

Vivaldi's Ruarí Ødegaard today informs Softpedia about the availability of a new development snapshot towards the Vivaldi 1.6 web browser, versioned 1.6.687.3.

Rebased on the open-source Chromium 55.0.2883.76 web browser, Vivaldi Snapshot 1.6.687.3 is here a week after the first development release, Vivaldi Snapshot 1.6.682.3, to introduce two exciting new features, but also to fix many of the issues and annoyances reported by users since the previous snapshot.

On December 7, 2016, the Linux Foundation-hosted Xen Project proudly announced the release of Xen 4.8 hypervisor, the powerful open source industry standard for virtualization.

It's been a little over five months since the release of the Xen 4.7 series, and it looks like the development team behind this highly customizable, extensible and flexible type-1 or baremetal hypervisor did not stop improving the software and adding new features to it. Xen 4.8 is the latest stable and most advanced version, which focuses on advanced embedded use cases and enhances support of ARMv8-A based servers.

Hardware giant Lenovo is banking on a future where both public and private clouds are critical in driving IT innovation, and the glue binding those hybrid environments is mostly open source technologies.

Dan Harmon, Lenovo's group director of cloud and software-defined infrastructure, encouraged solution providers attending the NexGen Cloud Conference & Expo on Wednesday to explore opportunities to engage Lenovo as its products stock the next generation of cloud data centers.

Both public and private clouds are growing rapidly and will dominate the market by 2020, Harmon told attendees of the conference produced by CRN parent The Channel Company.

Recently, we've taken note of the many organizations offering free or low cost Hadoop and Big Data training. MIT and MapR are just a couple of the players making waves in this space. Recently, Cloudera announced a catalog of online, self-paced training classes covering the company's entire portfolio of industry-standard Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark training courses. The courses, according to Cloudera, allow you to learn about the latest big data technologies "in a searchable environment anytime, anywhere."

Now, Cloudera has announced an updated lineup of training courses and performance-based certification exams for data analysts, database administrators, and developers. The expanded training offerings address the skills gap around many top open source technologies, such as Apache Impala (incubating), Apache Spark, Apache Kudu, Apache Kafka and Apache Hive.

In December 2015, the COP21 Paris Agreement saw many countries commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions through initiatives in the land sector. In this context, emissions estimation systems will be key in ensuring these targets are met. Such solutions would not only be capable of assessing past trends but also of supporting target setting, tracking progress and helping to develop scenarios to inform policy decisions.

Blender Institute, a platform for 3D design and animation, are collaborating with Lulzbot 3D printers. This project a continuation of Lulzbot and Blender Institute’s approach to open source and aimed at enhancing collaboration. The Blender Institute in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, is an important figure in the Free and Open Source Software community (FOSS). Providing open source design tool software for 3D movies, games, and visual effects. While Lulzbot, a product line of Aleph Objects take an open source approach to hardware through their 3D printers.

Ah, yes. I remember the good old days when you had to be a real man or woman to install Linux, and the first time you tried you ended up saying something like “Help!” or maybe “Mommmmyyyyy!” Really, kids, that’s how it was. Stacks of floppies that took about 7,000 hours to download over your 16 baud connection. Times sure have changed, haven’t they?

I remember Caldera advertising that their distribution autodetected 1,500 different monitors. I wrote an article titled “Monitor Number 1501,” because it didn’t detect my monitor. And sound. Getting sound going in Linux took mighty feats of systemic administsationish strength. Mere mortals could not do it. And that’s why we had installfests: so mighty Linux he-men and she-women could come down from the top of Slackware Mountain or the Red Hat Volcano and share their godlike wisdom with us. We gladly packed up our computers and took them to the installfest location (often at a college, since many Linux-skilled people were collegians) and walked away with Linuxized computers. Praise be!

Right on the heels of Ubuntu 16.10 'Yakkety Yak' is Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus. Ubuntu 17.04 is currently scheduled for release on April 13, 2017 but know that this is only an estimate. One thing to know is that all things being equal, it is going to be released in April 2017. Ubuntu Zesty Zapus will be supported for only 9 months until January 2018 as it is not a LTS (long term support) release.

Researchers from antivirus provider Eset said "Stegano," as they've dubbed the campaign, dates back to 2014. Beginning in early October, its unusually stealthy operators scored a major coup by getting the ads displayed on a variety of unnamed reputable news sites, each with millions of daily visitors. Borrowing from the word steganography—the practice of concealing secret messages inside a larger document that dates back to at least 440 BC—Stegano hides parts of its malicious code in parameters controlling the transparency of pixels used to display banner ads. While the attack code alters the tone or color of the images, the changes are almost invisible to the untrained eye.

Many network security cameras made by Sony could be taken over by hackers and infected with botnet malware if their firmware is not updated to the latest version.

Researchers from SEC Consult have found two backdoor accounts that exist in 80 models of professional Sony security cameras, mainly used by companies and government agencies given their high price.

One set of hard-coded credentials is in the Web interface and allows a remote attacker to send requests that would enable the Telnet service on the camera, the SEC Consult researchers said in an advisory Tuesday.

After years of wrestling GnuPG with varying levels of enthusiasm, I came to the conclusion that it's just not worth it, and I'm giving up. At least on the concept of long term PGP keys.

This is not about the gpg tool itself, or about tools at all. Many already wrote about that. It's about the long term PGP key model—be it secured by Web of Trust, fingerprints or Trust on First Use—and how it failed me.

Bruno Friedmann has announced the end to AMD proprietary driver fglrx support in openSUSE while also announcing they don't plan to support the hybrid proprietary AMDGPU-PRO stack either.

Friedmann wrote, "Say goodbye fglrx!, repeat after me, goodbye fglrx... [In regards to the newer AMDGPU-PRO stack] I will certainly not help proprietary crap, if I don’t have a solid base to work with, and a bit of help from their side. I wish good luck to those who want to try those drivers, I’ve got a look inside, and got a blame face."

Over the past few years, interest in both civilian and commercial use of drones has continued to grow rapidly, and drone hardware sits at the top of many people's holiday wish lists.
Even just within the civilian side of things, the list of unmanned aerial devices which fit the moniker of drone seems to be constantly expanding. These days, the term seems to encompass everything from what is essentially a cheap, multi-bladed toy helicopter, all the way up to custom-built soaring machines with incredibly adept artificial intelligence capabilities.

With Fedora 25 out the door a couple of weeks ago, Fedora is once again moving ahead towards Fedora 26. As usual after a new release, the Fedora Elections are getting into gear. There are a fair number of seats up for election this release, across both the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) and the Fedora Council. The elections are one of the ways you can have an impact on the future of Fedora by nominating and voting. Nominate other community members (or self-nominate) to run for a seat in either of these leadership bodies to help lead Fedora. For this election cycle, nominations are due on December 12th, 2016, at 23:59:59 UTC. It is important to get nominations in quickly before the window closes. This article helps explain both leadership bodies and how to cast a nomination.

Endless Sky is a 2D space trading and combat game similar to Escape Velocity. The game sets you as a beginning pilot, just having made a down payment on your very first starship. You’re given a choice between a shuttle, a freighter or a fighter. Depending on what ship you choose, you will need to figure out how to earn money to outfit and eventually upgrade your ship. You can transport passengers, run cargo, mine asteroids or even hunt pirates. It’s an open-ended game that blends the top-down action of a 2D space shooter with the depth and replayability of a 4X.

I’ve known of affinity mapping, and even tried to use sticky notes to figure out some of my data in the first UX project I did. Unfortunately, as I found out at the time, analysis of the data I get in UX research doesn’t really lend itself to being done alone. Much like statistics, I suspect. I’m not at all sure how UX consultants do their analyses, given this!

Open source technology is a positive example of the way the internet can encourage global collaboration working towards a more secure and creative future. Here are four predictions for open source technologies in 2017:

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.